Zandria Robinson
African American Studies, Georgetown University
Zandria Robinson, a native Memphian, is Arthur and Janice’s daughter, and Dasie, Bob, Celia, and Jack’s granddaughter. She is an ethnographer, cultural critic, and memoirist whose work explores race, gender, sound, and spirit in the US South. Robinson is the author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South, an ethnography of Black cultures in Memphis, and coauthor of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Her writing on race, place, and music, as well as her profiles of the living and the dead, can be found in several places, including Rolling Stone, Scalawag, Believer, Oxford American, New York Times Magazine, and Glamour. Robinson is at work on a book-length memoir, “Surely You’ll Begin the World,” a two-sided telling of the deaths of three fathers: her daughter’s father, her mother’s father, and her own father.